Portrait Artist Forum - Nuts and Bolts of a Portrait

In these uncertain economic times, an artist's marketing skills are critical for survival. In fact you need to be as skilled with your marketing plans as you are with a brush. A few years ago I was represented by a fellow expatriate who owned an antique shop on a fairly busy square in Maastricht. She and I were discussing ways to draw people's attention to my portrait work at which point she asked me if I would paint her daughter. I had been playing around with another idea, a work which would divide my painting technique into various stages, showing potential clients how a portrait was built up. Thus the first "marketing triptych" was born.

The work consisted of three panels connected by hinges. The first panel showed the underdrawing, the second the underpainting, and the third the finished portrait itself. The panels could be moved forward allowing the triptych to stand on a table, in place of hanging it on a wall. My agent would periodically move the triptych about her shop and later told me when people first entered, they were drawn to it like a magnet.

I painted two more of these marketing triptychs. In the last one of my daughter Eva (see below), the figure overlaps from one panel into the next. This is to demonstrate that the work is not simply one painting photographed three times in different stages, but rather three separately painted panels, something that's not immediately clear when seen in a photo or on my website.

The point of this story is that by displaying the triptych, interested people could to see the nuts and bolts of a portrait, and happily I received many commissions as a result. It's human nature to be curious about how something is made. I hope someone finds this concept useful.

S. Bartner